Filed under Content Management

Should you put a link to LinkedIn on a biography page of a law firm website? That was the question posed recently on the Legal Marketing Association (LMA) listserv by Gail Lamarche Director of Marketing at Henderson, Franklin, Starnes & Holt.

I opined that, for professional services firms such as this law firm, the attorney biography page is the best thing we have as a “money page” on the website. Therefore, driving visitors away from the money page was, strategically, a bad idea. Moreover, it seemed if there were really content on LinkedIn that was valuable to the site visitor, then that information should be on the bio page. And if it wasn’t there, the bio page was somehow deficient.

Smug I was in the righteousness of my response. But I got an earful of dissent from LMA listserv contributors. The arguments are worthy of consideration:

Jayne Navarre, LawGravity, presented these points persuasively:

• Branding – The LinkeIn link is like a hip badge of Web 2.0 awareness
• Connections – LinkedIn provides a transparent view to an attorney’s connections, arguably a value to any prospective client
• Authoritative - Access to the LinkedIn Questions & Answers provides additional proof of the attorney’s authority

Heather Milligan, Director of Marketing at Barger Wolen emphasized that LinkedIn:

• Human - helps make the attorney “dynamic, human, liked”( in case we have any residual concerns about their humanity) and helps the attorney pass the “known, liked & trusted” test of prospective clients.
• Dimensional - And in rebuttal to my “bio is deficient” comment, Heather notes that to maintain a certain appearance consistent with other bios and the overall website, “the firm bio is controlled for content, style, etc….(while) LinkedIn is the perfect place where an attorney can bring together their outside interests and professional careers, making them more human and likeable.
• Connections - Perhaps the most valuable feature, LinkedIn is fundamentally a connecting tool that might serendipitously reveal a third party connection to the site visitor which presents all kinds of opportunity for real introduction.

It’s not a slam dunk either way. The answer to Gail’s original question seems to be, “It depends.” The circumstances dictate the strategy. I’ll give it a nod of possibility and something worth trying.  Yes, I know, “first I was against it, now I’m for it.” Thanks to the enlightenment of my marketing peers.

But I’ll have this last (never!) word.  Think doubly hard about sending your site visitor from the most valuable conversion page of  your site to an information wasteland. Don’t do it unless the LinkedIn profile to which you are sending visitors:

• provides a rich set of business connections
• demonstrates some effort to contribute authoritatively to the online Q&A discourse
• otherwise expands on the website attorney bio page
• (if possible) provides a path back

And whatever you do, measure the results. Professionals keep score.

Now you can link away to my LinkedIn profile.

The Internet always has been and is becoming even more of a scary place. With all those unwashed masses contributing content, heck, even CNN has implemented “iReport.com: Your stories, unfiltered” Almost every CNN article invites reader contribution which often exceeds the original story in depth and thoughtfulness. But it also affords the opportunity for shallow, callow observations and attempts to advance personal agendas. Scary. And disruptive.

Remember the good ol’ days when only those with money and access could spin their messages to their hearts’ contentment?  When you could purchase a listing in a business directory and the biggest challenge was which one’s? They’re fading fast. The rules we learned to follow just don’t work as well as they used to. Time to learn the new rules.

Recently I was following an online discussion regarding Wikipedia. The issue was whether businesses, in this case, law firms that often have a broad public presence and handle newsworthy cases, should seek to gain a listing. The challenge or perhaps more accurately, risk, is that once the listing is successfully obtained in Wikipedia anyone might comment, add to or modify the original carefully vetted explanatory copy.

I believe that what it comes down to is not trying to control the top-down message. Rather, the task is to monitor and participate in the egalitarian conversation. It’s all about reputation management, not control.

It’s been 15 years (!!!) since Peter Steiner published his cartoon in the New Yorker, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”  It’s taken some time for all of us to figure out what his prescient remark was about. Welcome to the age of transparency. You’re on display and anybody can sharp shoot you.  And will.  Even if they’re a dog – or a disgruntled client, a competitor or the random crank.

So what does this mean for us little folks marketing our companies?  First, acknowledge that even the best companies with the finest reputations have their dark corners waiting to be revealed. Second, so what? The internet is ubiquitous, so it is time to come out of hiding; we see you anyway.

Wikipedia? Absolutely contribute your objective knowledge. But maybe your approach should be more about participating in existing subjects that are already published rather than treating the medium like it is another directory inviting your carefully-scripted-&-reviewed-3-levels-up position statement. It is no longer about you; it’s about us and what we want to know. Not what you want to tell us. And besides, if I don’t like what you say, I’m going to change it or respond. Like I said, scary.

It’s time we go back to our job descriptions and add “reputation management” to our public relations responsibilities. The great news is that there are lots of tools and tactics for managing reputation online. But it’s going to take some of our precious time to learn some new skills.

As business units demand more from a web presence, IT has been asked to respond with web content management (WCM) systems that do more than deliver content. This webcast from Search CIO Midmarket (registration and Real Player required) examines the types of content management systems available, the differences between standard WCM products and persuasive WCM products that manage and deliver content.

Duo Consulting CEO Michael Silverman and Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, producers of the Web Content Conferences, sift through the hype of certain features and discuss web delivery extras such as personalization, analytics, and multichannel delivery. They also offer specific advice and user examples on how you can set up a successful WCM system that meets the needs of both IT and the business.

“The economy and a newly designed Web site are being credited for a dramatic increase in interest in the Chicago Public Library system,” WBBM’s Bernie Tafoya reported last month. In this interview, You can reserve a book, CD, or DVD online, and if it not available it will be delivered to the library branch of your choice and you will be notified by email.

The Chicago Tribune, in a recent article about this Find it, Chicago service appropriately labels it “NetBooks” because it offers the functionality of NetFlix without the subscription fee. At Duo we’re just glad that the thousands of hours spent learning about users needs, designing the new interface, and developing the enhanced functionality has paid off for the Library and citizens of Chicago.

You’re at the point in the discovery phase of a project when you learn your client has a limited budget and their site needs to be live in weeks. “Argh” you think to yourself - if they only had a longer deadline and more cash we could really do a knock out job and not sacrifice all the whiz-bang features.

Constraints are an unavoidable reality of every project. Instead of wishing your client had more resources, stop and embrace the project’s constraints. Having too little time and money makes you examine the goals of your project and helps you create simple and efficient ways to solve your client’s problems.

Possibilities are endless but constraints are knowns that force you to focus on core issues of the project while cutting out all of the extraneous background noise of the “bells and whistle” features that are usually non-essential to solving the problem.

We recently took on a project for the Illinois Institute of Technology who had an extremely tight deadline to get a site up to promote a new university-wide planning process aimed at reestablishing IIT as a major force in higher education. The site was intended to give background on the plan and solicit opinions from its faculty, staff and students. Here our major constraint was time. From project start to project completion we clocked in at just less than three weeks turn around, successfully getting a site up that would provide as a means to inform and gather feedback for IIIT. The site is simple and focused but most importantly it solves a problem for our client.

“Man built most nobly when limitations were at their greatest.”
— Frank Lloyd Wright

A post over at “The Official Google Blog” points out that unicode is the most widely used character encoding in indexed pages. It’s about time! Read more here.

While your home page may not be from where most of your traffic comes it’s still important to direct users to the content that they want as efficiently as possible. After all, your web site has a purpose, and regardless of whether that purpose is to propagate information, encourage people to sign up for your newsletter, or to sell widgets, the content on your site can help to focus people’s attention toward solving their goals (and yours).

A great example of focused attention is the home page for SimpleTest, a PHP unit testing framework (tool for web application developers):

It’s easy to tell what you can do with this site by scanning down the large graphics on the left hand side of the page. You can download the code, get started writing tests (although maybe this should have been called “Tutorial” or “Documentation”), get support, or contribute to the project.

The upper right of the site even contains a callout summary about the latest version and what is important about it:

By offering these highlights, you’re giving your visitors options even if your site serves different audiences simultaneously.

Here at Duo, we’re constantly preaching the virtues of using a Content Management System — you get to control and manage your own content whenever and however you’d like.

I think, though, that we often forget how much fun that can be. The CPSAlumni.org site has just officially launched, and as part of that launch process, they’ve decided to create Festival pages and activities to get people involved.

It’s a pretty nifty idea that merges home-grown marketing with content management and a sense of whimsy — and that’s a Good Thing.

OK, I hate PDF’s on websites. Don’t you just say “Argh!” when you unsuspectingly click a link only to realize that you’ve started to open your Adobe Reader application and download a PDF file the size of Alaska? And you’re working at Starbucks sharing the already-modest bandwidth with 38 other hyper-caffeinated transient workers so the download puts you into a time/space continuum?

But PDF’s have an important role on the web. And many organizations have valuable content assets that reside in their PDF documents. So not only should you use PDF’s correctly, but you also want to insure their content is indexed by search engines to help drive traffic to your site.

So, in spite of my antipathy to PDF’s, I was disturbed to read this instruction issued to several thousand professional services marketers on a recent listserv post (OMG!):

“The other important thing is to include no robots TXT on PDF’s so the engine doesn’t index the PDF as a stand alone page which is a dead end.”

Huh? Sorry. Not dead end. Dead wrong. If you use PDF documents on your website:

• Complete the document’s properties (especially the title)
• Add links to PDF documents, so that readers arriving at your PDF can always be redirected back to your website (no dead ends)
• Save files at the lowest possible Acrobat version, so that readers can easily open them, and search engines can find them
• File sizes should be kept as small as possible to avoid users abandoning the download

And, please, alert website visitors the link they are about to click is a PDF. No more “Argh!”

There it was again, the 250-word-RULE. It popped up as gospel at an industry conference seminar and espoused by a professional search marketer to the trusting throngs. So let’s debunk it again and right now:

There is no magic number of words on a web page that will help spirit your web page to the top of the search engine results. It is not 250 words or 25 words or any specific or even general number in between. The length of the text on the page does not prevent or encourage the search engines from including the page in their indexes.
 
Where’d this 250-word-rule rumor start? Perhaps many sources. But only noted search marketer Danny Sullivan is willing to take credit for making this claim last century, about 10 billion search engine algorithmic revisions ago.  And today even Danny calls this a myth.
 
Want further proof? My colleague, Fred, just posted on this blog a short diddy about some guy named Gordon Dioxide. His post is 43 words. He posted it 2 days ago. When I did a search on this name, Fred’s post was not only indexed but was the third result on the first page. So much for 250 words.

So what is the truth about word count on a page and SEO? The truth, of course, is much more complicated than the rumor. That’s why the rumor prevails; it’s simplistic, formulaic and easy to remember. But inaccurate. Or at least incomplete. The truth is messy and complicated. But here’s a practical tip. Write with your reader in mind. If a page of text is about a single idea, e.g. the phony 250-word-rule, and if you develop your idea with rich text that includes the key phrases for which you want to be found, perhaps you will be.